If you look younger than 25, soon you won't be able to smoke until you swipe.
Stores in Kingston that are equipped with lottery terminals are installing new equipment that requires people buying cigarettes to provide their driver's licence and have it swiped before the sale goes through.
The machines read the magnetic stripe on the back of the licence and verify whether the purchaser is at least 19 years old.
"What we're trying to do is eliminate the human error in the system," said Steve Tennant, national director of the program, which is being backed by the association representing convenience store owners in Ontario.
"Swiping the card and having the person's age come up on a computer screen eliminates any errors ... in calculating someone's age."
He uses his own experience as an example.
"My birthdate is 01/11. Well, does that mean Jan. 11 or Nov. 1? There's almost a year's difference in those two ages and a clerk in a hurry with five people waiting in line could easily make a mistake calculating the correct age of the customer."
Stores will also use the system to monitor the sale of other age-restricted products, such as lottery tickets, fireworks and adult magazines. Machines are also being used to check age in LCBO and Beer Store agency stores located inside private businesses, primarily in rural areas.
They are not being installed in government-owned beer or liquor stores like those in Kingston.
Tennant said the machines are in use across the country and in about 10,000 stores in Ontario.
Because the data is not stored or shared - and the machines are owned by the provincial government, not individual shopkeepers - privacy advocates
say the program, dubbed We Expect ID, doesn't present an issue for them.
"We have not conducted a formal investigation, but we have looked into the matter and conducted a site visit," said Heather Ormerod, speaking for the federal privacy commissioner in Ottawa.
"We found that the collection of personal data was limited and allowed by privacy legislation."
Tennant said the machines are the most sophisticated system of ID verification in use today.
He says store owners were enthusiastic because having the machines -and requiring staff to use them - protects them against charges laid for selling tobacco to minors, which carries fines and possible loss of their licence to sell cigarettes if they are convicted more than once.
Employees can take online training on how to use the machine through the program's website, which offers the training in English, French and Korean.
Tennant said if a person does not want to have their licence swiped by the machine, they do not have to, and can simply display it to the clerk in the normal way.
"If you don't want us to swipe it, we won't swipe it," he said.
There is a large amount of data available on driver's licences and enhanced driver's licences are being discussed by governments that could include passport and other information.
Tennant says the machines do not take any other information from the licence except the person's date of birth, and do not store that information after it has been retrieved.
"Nothing is recorded, the only thing that is lifted off the magnetic strip is the age of the person," he said.
In the United States, such systems could be linked to large databases and transmit and store much more personal information, but such systems are not allowed by Canadian law, Ormerod said.
She said consumers have the right to ask what a store is planning to do with information it requests from a customer, but there have not been any objections to the system filed with the commissioner in the time it has been in use.
"We haven't received any complaints about it."
Tennant said the other benefit is that when a clerk uses a machine to check the card, it is less offensive to people than being asked personally, and is something shoppers will become accustomed to.
"We're not trying to offend people by asking them for their ID - it's the law."